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State Senator Blasts TEA for Hitting the Brakes on Seat-Belt-Equipped School Buses

Publish Date: September 2, 2010 10:01 amAuthor: Texas AFT

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Sen. Eddie Lucio, Democrat of Brownsville, is more than a little displeased with the Texas Education Agency, which has decided that a law Lucio wrote requiring new school buses to be equipped with seat belts cannot be implemented immediately and will not be backed by the full $10 million the legislature appropriated for it. The planned funding has been scaled back to less than $4 million by TEA in response to a directive from the governor and legislative leaders last spring to cut agency spending by 5 percent. TEA also says that legislative officials have yet to approve a required implementation plan.

At a capitol press conference on Tuesday, Sen. Lucio was not in the mood to hear any excuses. Lucio (as reported in the Dallas Morning News) said: “I will not let the TEA subvert this bill and the law of the state….I will not let any bureaucrat or bureaucracy stand in the way of making seat belts a reality on all school buses….TEA has clearly forgotten who they work for–the parents of Texas.”

The statutory requirement to outfit all new school buses with seat belts applies only to the extent that the state provides the money to pay for it. Though $10 million would not be enough to equip all new buses with seat belts, advocates of the requirement say that amount would pay for seat belts for 80,000 students.

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Texas AFT represents all non-administrative certified and classified public school employees. We represent the interests of teachers, counselors, librarians, diagnosticians, custodians, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, nurses, teaching assistants, clerical employees, and the other men and women who work so hard to make our schools work. We also represent employees in universities, colleges and community and junior colleges.

Texas AFT is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers and AFL-CIO. Photographs and illustrations, as well as text, cannot be used without permission from the AFT.